Evaluating the Timing and Duration of Dwelling and Non-dwelling Elements in the Reversing Falls Site, a Middle Maritime Woodland Shell Midden in the Far Northeast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper we consider the temporal relationships between dwellings and shell-bearing deposits at the Reversing Falls site in the Maine-Maritimes region of the far Northeast. Shell middens are multitemporal, comprised of the archaeological signatures of historical processes that took place over vastly different durations. They are also stratigraphically complex and difficult to interpret; moreover, coarse-scale site chronologies have made it difficult to assess the tempo of daily household activities and, in particular, the relationship between midden and dwelling deposits. In fact, in the Maine-Maritimes region, archaeologists have tended to assume that dwellings shell-bearing deposits at sites like Reversing Falls represent events occurring together gradually and homogeneously over a millennium. This pilot project uses radiocarbon dating, sedimentological, and stratification data amassed from column samples to test this assumption and to see what they might reveal about the temporality of dwelling and non-dwelling deposits at this particular site; our results should contribute to our understanding of shell-midden site formation, but also aspects of Ancestral Wabanaki household organization, settlement, and mobility.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 30952